by Craig Rice
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “This doesn’t seem to commit me to anything. And it does commit you to a lot.”
“If there are any changes—” Arthur Schlee began, in his lawyer’s voice.
She shook her lovely head. “No. Only it doesn’t seem fair. I just promise not to pose for photographs, or consider any picture jobs for a period of seven days. In return they agree to star me in their forthcoming production.” Her smile became even prettier and more modest. “I mean, it just doesn’t seem fair to them—”
Arthur Schlee, remembering fast who his clients were, said, “If this is agreeable to them—”
“Oh, sure,” she said, with that endearing lift of the lip. “Only it says here, ‘in consideration of one dollar’—can we write in a phrase or something, that if anything goes wrong, I give them the dollar back?”
Leo Henkin took over. “Little Miss Janesse,” he said. “Old Leo Henkin knows this business. These boys are not gambling one dollar, they’re gambling”—he gave Bingo a questioning glance—“a fortune. Take old Leo Henkin’s advice. Sign it.”
She took the pen Bingo handed her, poised it daintily over the paper for a moment and then said, “I don’t know. Do you think the trade papers should be notified?”
Bingo said quickly, “Maybe a picture of you signing. Handsome can take it. Make some fast prints. And maybe our friend Leo Henkin can help out—”
Leo Henkin said, “Make the picture. Leo Henkin will see to it that the story gets out. Leo Henkin will make sure it’s a better story than Romulus and Remus running out of milk.”
Handsome set up the small camera, fast. Bingo said, “Wait a minute. Handsome—”
Handsome nodded, whipped into the kitchen and whipped back again with a tray of glasses, two bottles of champagne and two orchids.
“For you,” Bingo said softly, pinning one corsage on Janesse Budlong. “For a great future. And for you, my dear”—with a smile for Joyce Grimstead—“for being so helpful.”
Handsome poured the champagne. The contracts were signed in a flourish of flashbulbs and flowers. Bingo tried to sit back and relax. This was why they’d come to Hollywood, to sign a forthcoming star, to own—live in—a mansion, to be surrounded by agents, lawyers and flashbulbs.
This was the great occasion, this was what they had been working toward. It was all so wonderful, and yet—he wondered what had happened to April Robin; he even wondered for one wild moment if April Robin’s body was buried somewhere underneath her house.
He looked across the room, smiled as best he could at Janesse Budlong, and said quietly, “What was your mother’s maiden name?”
She looked straight back at him and mouthed the words, “Damned if I’ll tell.” He knew from the look in her eyes that he didn’t dare ask more.
Finally it was all over. The contracts signed, the champagne drunk, the last picture taken.
Joyce Grimstead said, “Good luck, kids. Not that you’ll need it, but I always think it’s polite to offer it.”
Janesse Budlong said, almost tearfully, “I don’t know what to say—I don’t know what to say—” and didn’t say it.
Leo Henkin said warmly, “Remember now, when you need studio space, writers, anything, call on old Leo Henkin. Just because you fell into a gold mine doesn’t mean you may not need a digger.”
The big house seemed very, very still, and very, very empty after they had all gone. Bingo sat silently on the davenport while Handsome did a fast darkroom job on the pictures of Janesse Budlong signing the contracts, of the future new star toasting the deal with champagne.
Once Bingo reached for the phone and started to call Vital Statistics. No, if whatever had happened to April Robin had been hushed up, there would be no good in asking.
On a momentary impulse he dialed Victor Budlong and said gaily, “Well, I signed your daughter—”
Victor Budlong’s voice came back softly. “I’m glad. I feel she can get somewhere with you managing her. Well, well, well. My little girl is going to get somewhere, at last.” There was the kind of pause it usually took someone to light a cigar. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Oh no,” Bingo said bravely. “Just wanted to tell you. But since you’re on the wire. There is one question—!”
“Whatever you want to know,” Victor Budlong said.
“Good,” Bingo said. “Now.” He braced himself. “Whatever did happen to April Robin?”
The silence sounded as though it had, been dropped from outer space.
“If you don’t know,” Victor Budlong said at last, “I don’t want to be the one to tell you.” And that seemed to be that.
twenty
“I’m getting very confused, Handsome,” Bingo confided as he sank down on the davenport. He wished for a moment that he were caught in a traffic jam at the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. He wished he were trying to work out a theory in nuclear physics. “There seem to be so many things I know, and yet so many things I don’t know. How are we ever going to get rich and famous if all these problems keep popping up?”
“Murder is a problem,” Handsome agreed, nodding solemnly.
“I have to make a few more phone calls,” Bingo said. He looked at Handsome apologetically. “I realize I’m running up the phone bill—”
“The telephone is our cheapest luxury,” Handsome said. “I once read a pamphlet on it put out by the New York Telephone Company. It gave a comparison list of prices in the rising cost of living. And whereas the price of wire and plastic and labor had gone up—”
But Bingo was already dialing.
“Hello?” he said into the phone. “William Willis?”
“Yes,” Willis said. “Who’s this?”
“Bingo Riggs.”
“Oh, yes. Hello.”
“Mr. Willis, I wonder if I may ask you a few questions. If you don’t mind, that is.”
“Is it about my sister?” Willis asked.
“Yes. Your stepsister. You did say she was your stepsister, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And her name, before she married Julien Lattimer, was Lois DeLee. Is that also right?”
“Yes.”
“And she was a slack-wire performer?”
“Yes, and a darned good one,” Willis said.
“Did you ever see her act?”
“Of course I did. You might say, in fact, that I first met her while she was doing her act.”
Bingo blinked. “How was that again?” he said.
“Lois. I first met her in 1947. We were booked together on the same bill. Me and my birds, and her and her slack wire.”
Bingo blinked again. “If I understand you correctly,” he said, “you’re saying you first met your sister in 1947? Is that what you’re saying?”
“If you want to be technical about it,” Willis said, “I first met her in 1922. That was when my father married her mother. He was a widower, and Lois’ mother was a widow. They met, fell in love, and got married. Lois had an older brother, Frank. He’s dead now. Died young.”
“Then if you really met Lois in 1922, why did you say—?”
“Well, when our folks got married, we all moved into the same house, naturally,” Willis said.
“Naturally,” Bingo replied.
“I was about twenty-one years old then. This was in 1924. Lois was just a little kid.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I left home. Not right away, but about a year after the marriage. Figured I was about ready to step out into the world on my own. The family moved away from Hollywood soon after that. To Colorado. So the last time I saw Lois, until 1947 when we booked on the same bill, was when she was eleven years old. And meeting her in 1947 was like meeting an entirely different person, if you know what I mean. It was quite a reunion.”
“I can imagine,” Bingo said. “Had she changed much?”
“Well, after all,” Willis said, “quite a few years had gone by. She was in her early thirties in 1947
. Sure, she’d changed. She was a young woman and not a little girl any more. But she was still delicate… and fragile… and blond, and with this enormous spirit of gentility. I loved my sister very much.”
“When did she marry Lattimer?” Bingo asked.
“Several years later. Must have been 1949 or 1950. Yes, that’s right. That was when they bought your—” He corrected himself. “The house you’re living in now. That’s right. About three years before they both disappeared.”
“Thank you, sir,” Bingo said, and he hung up.
“Well?” Handsome asked.
Bingo was already thumbing through the directory. “I have another call to make,” he said. “Do you know what the whole trouble with this setup is, Handsome?”
“What?”
“The dead won’t stay dead,” he answered, and he began dialing. “He ought to be home by now, don’t you think?”
“Who?” Handsome asked.
Bingo didn’t get a chance to answer. A voice on the other end of the line said, “The Henkin residence.”
“Let me talk to Leo Henkin, please,” Bingo said.
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“Bingo Riggs.”
“One moment please, sir.”
Bingo waited. Handsome watched him.
Henkin’s voice came onto the line. “Well, well, how’s the discoverer from New York?” he said. “What can old Leo Henkin do for you?”
“I want to know about April Robin,” Bingo said.
There was a long pause on the line.
“Do you know about her?” Bingo asked.
“Leo Henkin knows everything,” Henkin said, but the brass had gone out of his voice.
“Then I want you to tell me what you know.”
“It’s a sad story. And a long one.”
“I’ve got plenty of time and plenty of sympathy,” Bingo said. “Where do you want to meet?”
“Come over here,” Henkin said. “To my house.” And he gave Bingo the address.
The Beverly Hills home of Leo Henkin did not resemble his office at all. Whereas the office had looked like an extension of Santa Anita Raceway, with horses cluttering up each wall and surface, his home was a clean low modern house which seemed to be built chiefly of flagstone and glass. And curiously, the Leo Henkin who lived in this house did not very much resemble the Leo Henkin from the horsy office. A servant met Bingo and Handsome at the front door, led them through a slate-paved entrance hallway and then into a lanai which overlooked Henkin’s large swimming pool. Henkin was wearing chino pants and a sports shirt. The shirt was neither loud nor particularly Californian, Bingo noticed, and he wondered if the twinkling little man in the horse-bestrewn office was simply an act for the industry. As Leo Henkin advanced with his hand outstretched, he seemed somehow taller than his five feet three inches, somehow more relaxed than he would ever look in his private office. “Come in,” he said, “come in. Can I get you something to drink?”
“If you don’t mind, Mr. Henkin,” Bingo said, “we’d like to get straight to the point. We’d like to know about April Robin.”
Leo Henkin heaved a particularly forlorn little sigh. He gestured to two Saarinen chairs and then sat in another chair facing the pool. Darkness had come with its customary suddenness. The flagstones surrounding the pool were black and shadowy, but the underwater lights cast a reflected glow into the lanai, tinting Henkin’s thin white hair with amber.
“Her real name was Abigail Ross,” Henkin said. “They changed it to April Robin when she began working for Metro in 1926. Her first movie was one of those Ruritanian romance things. The movie stank, but April Robin… ahhhhh!” Leo Henkin kissed his fingers. “She was only fifteen at the time, but God, what an actress! Have you ever seen her? Have you ever seen any of her pictures?”
“No,” Bingo admitted.
“A beauty, a beauty,” he said. “Like a bird, like a bird on the wing.”
“What did she look like?” Handsome asked, and his brow was furrowed and Bingo knew he was teasing his memory, coaxing it to come up with a photo of April Robin.
“Brown hair,” Henkin said, “as soft as mink. And big brown eyes. A delicate profile, high cheekbones, a rosebud mouth. Small-boned, she was, small all over, but with a beautiful figure. She was like a sister on the screen, do you know what I mean? But a sister with whom you wanted to commit incest. I’ll tell you what her secret was. Would you like to know what April Robin’s secret was?”
“Yes,” Bingo said.
“She was youth. She was fifteen and a star, both parents dead, most of her money going into a trust fund. Fifteen! Youth! And youth was in her face and her eyes and her body, and I’ll tell you something. She’d still be young today. She had that kind of beauty. If she was still alive today, she’d be forty-seven years old, and I’ll bet my house and my business and my life that she wouldn’t look a day over thirty-two. Unchangeable. The beauty that never grows old, a few have it, and they last forever. She’d be young always. You’d look at her and automatically think of her as a young girl.” Henkin shook his head. “If she’d lived. But she’s dead, isn’t she? A shame. A real shame.”
“How did she die, Mr. Henkin?” Handsome asked. His brow was still furrowed.
Henkin shook his head. “Oh, what a story,” he said, “what a terrible story. Do you know what happened in October of 1927?”
“Yes,” Handsome said. “The Jazz Singer opened at the Warner Theatre in New York.”
“The Jazz Singer,” Henkin said, nodding soberly. “And, of course, the revolution of the film industry. April Robin was working on a silent movie when the news broke. Somebody read the writing on the wall and immediately began reshooting it. It was a good thing, too. By the middle of 1928 the lousiest sound movies were outdrawing the best silent films all over the country. April Robin’s first sound film was released in December of 1928. She was just seventeen, I remember. She was one of the first silent stars to take the plunge.”
“What happened?” Bingo asked.
“I remember the opening,” Henkin said. He sighed. “It opened at the Pantages. There were signs all over the place.” He gestured with his hands. “Robin Speaks.” He paused. “Well, she spoke. And they laughed. Oh God, they laughed. They laughed because the voice wasn’t fragile April Robin. The voice was Abigail Ross of Brooklyn, New York. It didn’t fit the concept the movie public had of their star, and so they laughed. They laughed fit to bust. She ran out of the theatre, I remember. She grabbed the nearest car, and drove away. They said later that she really wasn’t a good driver, didn’t even have a license, in fact. They said that was what caused the accident.”
“She had an accident that night?”
“No, no,” Henkin said. “The next day. Nobody saw or heard from her that night. The next day the newspapers made a shambles of her career. One critic said she sounded like a millhand with laryngitis. She must have seen the papers. She was a very sensitive girl, and also a kid, don’t forget that. Only seventeen years old with a whole life ahead of her. In any case, for reasons nobody yet understands, she went to her Hollywood bank the next day and withdrew seventy-five thousand dollars—her entire savings. She was earning fabulous money, you know, but most of it went into a trust fund. Close to a million dollars at the time of the accident. But all she had in cash was seventy-five thousand dollars, and she withdrew that and drove off again. And then—”
Henkin paused. Except for the lights from the pool, the lanai was very dark. He switched on a lamp and then sat again, heavily, like and old, old man who had seen everything the movie colony could offer, the quick successes and the quicker failures, the overnight stardom, the exorbitant salary demands, the movies made and the movies remade, the cycles returning and vanishing, all of it.
“They found her at the bottom of a cliff the next day in the car she’d stolen. The car was a wreck, destroyed, completely burned—terrible, terrible. April Robin—the most beautiful and tender thing on the screen—she… sh
e couldn’t be described, it was that bad. They… they also found a few charred hundred-dollar bills in the wreckage. They identified them as part of the money she’d withdrawn from the bank that afternoon. And they found her purse, of course, with identification. And that was the end. The press hushed it up. They didn’t like the idea that maybe their reviews had caused what looked like a suicide.”
Henkin stopped talking. The room was very silent.
Bingo waited for what seemed like a very long time. Then he said, “You knew her personally?”
“Yes. I knew her personally.”
“Would you say that Janesse Budlong resembles her?”
“I would,” Henkin said.
“Resembles her very much?”
“A little,” Henkin said. “Actually, she resembles her mother more. That flaming red hair. Exactly like her mother’s.”
Bingo felt a slight twinge of disappointment.
“And her mother?” he said. “What was her maiden name?”
Henkin chuckled a bit. “Victor would kill me if I told you this, and so would Alexandria. That’s her name. Janesse’s mother. Alexandria.”
“Alexandria what?”
Henkin chuckled again. “Alexandria Breckenfoote, and for God’s sake, don’t tell Victor I told you.”
“There isn’t then,” Bingo said morosely, “the slightest possibility that Janesse Budlong is April Robin’s daughter.”
Henkin’s eyebrows went up onto his forehead. “Not the slightest possibility,” he said. “Even if April Robin hadn’t died in 1928, why, for God’s sake, I know people who were at the hospital when Janesse was born. Alexandria’s her mother all right, no question.” He paused. “What gave you the idea—?”
“I don’t know,” Bingo said. “I guess I’ve been thinking of ghosts too much. May I use your phone, Mr. Henkin?”
“Please,” Henkin said.
He put a call through to the Skylight Motel. A woman answered the phone and said that Mariposa DeLee had not yet returned. Bingo went back into the lanai, thanked Henkin for his time and information, and then started out with Handsome.
